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8 Answers
8

KVM over IP is nice, but depending on where you work it can be a hard sell to make the case and get your management to cut the check. If you use HP Proliant servers, you can order them with iLo, absorbing most of the remote management costs into the price of the server. Don't forget to budget the extra network ports you'll need. If you're retrofitting, personally I like the Raritan Dominion series best.

If it comes down to a choice between IPKVM and remote power control, choose the remote power control. Today's operating systems handle remote operations (SSH/RDP/VNC et al) well enough that you'd rarely need another means of KVM anyhow, and how often do you really need to make BIOS modifications from afar? You might give real consideration to skipping KVM altogether and using a few of these mobile PC stands. If you do real he-man debugging over the serial port, you can keep put a PC on it. If not, just keyboard and monitor. And maybe a little UPS.

For remote power control, I like these APC vertical switched rack PDUs. There are a range of them to fit your needs. A really nice feature is that they always show how many amps are being drawn, so you don't overload your circuit breakers. Keep in mind that servers tend to draw more power at startup and when they get hot (think HVAC failure) so you want to run your circuits at 70-80% of max, or less. These PDUs will do a staggered startup so that if for some reason your are powering up the whole rack at once, you don't immediately trip the breaker. Along with vertical power management, don't forget to acquire short power cords in 1' and 3' lengths - this will make your racks a lot neater and easier to manage!

Remote power and KVM are as I mentioned earlier, sometimes a tough sell. But sooner or later they will turn what would have been a 4-12 hour outage into something that's solved within 45 minutes or less.

Over in the network distribution part of the room, I am a big fan of NeatPatch. This picture really says it all:

Finally, this isn't rackmount, but I think server room monitoring is important. You need to know when the HVAC cuts out and the temperature starts rising! You may also want to have one with a camera so you get a security log of who's in there. I've been happy with NetBotz in the past, but if that's hard to get the boss to pay for (prices seem to have risen since APC acquired the company), you might have a look at the Weather Duck/Goose/etc from ITWatchDogs

The AMP NETCONNECT MRJ21 System. It's like an extension cord for your switch. You only have to run 8 thick cables instead of 48 CAT6 cables. We had a horrible mess of cables going from rack to rack before discovering these.

These days KVM-over-IP is a waste as all good servers have some version of remote management built in, whether IPMI or HP's excellent iLO, just make sure to not use versions which share a NIC as those have BAD failure modes if the NIC dies.

Personally I love serial concentrators for the few bits of gear that haven't added management ethernet ports.

For dark cable racks permanent gooseneck LED lights can be great, although I don't have any favourites there.

Hosts with a BIOS that works over the serial port, USB serial adapters and Paul Vixie's rtty (packaged as remote-tty in Ubuntu and Debian) logging continuously.

The primary advantage of this system is that when a server spews a huge amount of information out to the console and then wedges or reboots, you have a complete log of what happened, as well as what anybody was typing on the console up to that point.

I'm going to turn your question around - I've found something that specifically isn't rack-mounted that I find better than its rack-mounted equivalent (for us anyway).

We use blades for 98% of our servers and often don't need KVM access...EXCEPT that one time when you just do need it of course!

So rather than install a KVM into each rack we have 'gurneys' instead. They're wheeled trolleys with an LCD glued to the top and a keyboard and mouse/trackball on a shelf below. In the event of having to KVM into a blade we simply wheel the thing along, connect in and off we go.